Search a token list for msUSD and two assets come back. Both are filed as dollar stablecoins. One closed Wednesday at 33 cents, the other at 68. They come from unrelated issuers on unrelated chains, and the only thing they share is four letters.

DefiLlama tracks both, as asset 297 and asset 326. Add up the supply and there are 120.6 million tokens outstanding that were sold to somebody as a dollar. The market prices the whole pile at $55.7 million.

msUSD number one: the token that stopped trading

Main Street USD lives at 0x4ba01f22827018b4772cd326c7627fb4956a7c00 on Ethereum and 0xe5fb2ed6832def99dde57c0b9d9a56537c89121d on Sonic. Main St, the issuer, ran an options desk: the pitch was a market-neutral CME box-spread strategy paying around 12%, with msUSD as the dollar leg and a second token, msY, holding the yield claim.

It held the peg for ten months. The last daily close at a dollar was June 19, 2026, at $0.9993. The next day DefiLlama recorded 32.87 cents.

What broke it was an accountant leaving. Accountable, the firm publishing Main St's proof-of-reserves dashboard, ended the engagement over that weekend and said MainStreet had been unable to meet its verification standards. The dashboard went dark. Main St's own framing, reported by Protos, was that this represented a reporting issue and not a solvency issue.

Holders tested that. The redeemable buffer behind 74 million tokens was roughly $4 million, about five cents of exit capacity per dollar of supply. It emptied inside hours, leaving somewhere near $4,000. The token printed six cents intraday and closed June 23 at 22.5 cents.

The insurance fund was made of msUSD

Main St kept an insurance fund, and it held msUSD. The mechanism was a burnAsset call that destroys fund-held tokens so the coverage ratio matches net asset value.

That arithmetic spreads a loss across everyone still holding. It does not pay for a single redemption at par, and it shrinks in value at exactly the moment it is needed.

The damage travelled. Morpho's msY/USDC lending market hit 100% utilisation, trapping about $18 million of one curated vault's assets behind borrowers who could not be liquidated at any sensible price. msY itself fell to roughly 9.7 cents.

Two months on, the interesting number is not the price. It is the supply. Main Street USD had 82.06 million tokens outstanding on June 16. By June 23 that figure was 74.21 million. Today it is 74.8 million, and the count has drifted upward every week since the collapse. Fewer than one token in ten ever left. The rest sit in wallets that cannot redeem and will not sell, backed by a 24-hour trading volume of $403 across four Ethereum pools.

msUSD number two: the token that still trades

Metronome Synth USD is at 0x526728dbc96689597f85ae4cd716d4f7fccbae9d on Base, with deployments on Ethereum, Optimism and Plasma. Metronome is a synthetics protocol. You post collateral, mint msUSD or msETH against it, and swap between the synths inside a module the protocol operates.

On July 30, 2026, MetronomeDAO published a post-mortem putting roughly 6,367 msETH and about 4.57 million msUSD outside their backing. The cause was the swap module rather than a hack.

Metronome charged 0.45% to swap on Base and 0.55% on Ethereum. Its Chainlink ETH/USD feed sat outside a 0.15% band for 18.50% of all minutes on Base, with median staleness of 54 seconds. Traders who watched the real price could swap through a stale one and clear the fee. The team called March through July 2026 the worst five-month window for feed service in the protocol's history.

The market read the document quickly. msUSD closed at $0.9838 on July 29 and $0.8333 on July 30, the day the post-mortem went up. By July 31 it was $0.7378. It closed Wednesday at $0.6752, after setting its lowest daily close of $0.6744 on August 23.

Two tokens called msUSD, June 10 to August 27, 2026

Daily prices for Metronome Synth USD and Main Street USD from DefiLlama's stablecoin price history. Both are listed under the symbol MSUSD.

One haircut, applied to a whole protocol

Metronome's other synth tells you what the discount is really about. msETH trades at $1,701.74 against ether at $2,506.08, a gap of 32.1%. msUSD trades 32.5% below par. The disclosed shortfall in msUSD is 4.57 million tokens out of 45.8 million, near 10% of supply, so the price is not a straight read of the hole.

Traders are marking the protocol, not the asset. Both synths are claims on the same collateral and the same repair plan, so they get the same haircut whatever their own backing looks like. A holder of msUSD who never touched msETH is paying for msETH's gap.

The repair plan has a number in it that has already been passed. Metronome describes $34 million of looped synthetic positions and $6.5 million of full-range synth liquidity structured as last-to-leave, sized so the treasury can buy back and burn enough supply at a depeg of about 30%. msUSD has closed below 70 cents on 21 of the past 25 days. MET, the governance token that sits behind the treasury, carries a market capitalisation of $4.6 million.

Both of these tokens built a backstop denominated in the thing it was supposed to backstop. Main St's insurance fund held msUSD. Metronome's defensive book is a looped synth position. Both designs are cheap to run, which is the appeal, and both lose value at the same rate as the problem they exist to fix.

Why one of them is at 68 cents and the other is at 33

Disclosure quality does not explain the gap. Metronome published a detailed technical account with oracle statistics in it, and its token dropped 25% in 48 hours. Main St said the problem was reporting, and its token became untradeable.

The difference is depth. Metronome's msUSD turns over $1.58 million a day, mostly on Aerodrome on Base, so a holder who wants out can get out at 68 cents. Main Street USD turns over $403. There is no price at which 74 million tokens clear that market. The 33-cent quote is a number a screen displays, not an offer anyone can hit at size.

What your tracker is actually showing you

DefiLlama lists Main Street USD's circulating supply as $24.7 million. That is 74.8 million tokens marked at 33 cents. The dollar figure on a stablecoin dashboard is supply multiplied by market price, so an asset that collapses looks like a smaller stablecoin rather than a broken one. Metronome's $30.9 million works the same way: 45.8 million tokens at 67.5 cents.

Four habits worth picking up from this pair:

  • Match the contract address, not the symbol. Ticker collisions are common and nothing stops them. The address is the asset.
  • Read supply in tokens. A falling market cap on a stablecoin can mean redemptions or it can mean a falling price, and only the token count separates the two.
  • Check volume before you trust a quote. $403 a day is a rounding error, and any price built on it is decorative.
  • Ask what the safety fund holds. If the answer is the protocol's own token or its own synth, it is not a fund.

Neither of these assets is large enough to matter to the wider market. Together they are smaller than a quiet day in USDC. What they are good for is a demonstration: the word "stablecoin" on a dashboard is a category the issuer chose, and two products can wear it, share a ticker, and fail for reasons that have nothing to do with each other. Before you hold something because a list puts it next to USDT, check the address and check what the token does when a hundred people try to leave at once.